Author Archives: slambert

About slambert

IT innovator, dog lover, beach swimmer, star gazer, passionate cook. Mother. Green-thumb, choir singer, tinkler of the ivories and acapellist.

Sharon Robinson award winning video

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I got an email this morning from Sharon Robinson in Biology that she and her team had one first prize in the CholorFilms recent (session 3) content for the best plant videos on YouTube.

Congrats! I loved the video too, and learnt a lot. I’m emailing a link to my son, who is interested in this kind of thing and trying to work out some career/uni options. I wonder if it will impress a 15 year old? I guess he’s right on the money for a potential UOW student. (Bright kid, local high-school, curious by nature.)

Testing VMWare player in labs with FCA staff

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Been working with Brogan Bunt and Peter Goodall to get an open-source applications pilot up and running. Brogan wants to run his classes in the ITS labs, but with open-source software. The solution has been to install VMWare player in the labs, which allows other operating systems to be used. THen the students bring in a USB specially formatted with Ubuntu (Linux) operating system and a suite of open-source or freeware applications on it. They create a range of sound/media products with them. Then they take it home and use exactly the same software to do their homework and projects. No need for them to purchase expensive proprietory software at home, nor to treck in to uni just to use software. Let’s hope the pilot works well. Cos so far, it sounds fantastic!IMG_4708IMG_4709IMG_4710

iPad replaces paper, not laptops (from Inside Higher Ed).

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http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/07/12/golub

This was a good read. In a nutshell:

“The crucial question for academics is: What in our current arsenal will the iPad replace? After using the device, the answer surprised me: the iPad makes a lousy computer replacement, but it does a great job of replacing paper.”

The author Alex Golub also discusses the potential for the iPad and iTunes to revolutionalise access to journal articles that we currently rely on our uni’s library to supply, and make it much easier to just get the articles we want (as opposed to the piles of stuff the publishers bundle in to the subscriptions that we never want to wade through, but have to, to get to the stuff we want.)

ScreenR and SnapzPro

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I had our regular monthly catchup today with Rob Wright, to share innovations and eLearning initiatives. We discussed the possibility of doing a pilot for Media Creation Tools in second session, and i mentioned that the Learning Designers were also interested and possibly the Library staff who also create lots of online tutorials. I asked Rob what he used to create the “how to” video on his blog and he said SnapZpro and also mentioned that the Articulate community used and promoted a web-based serviced called ScreenR.

http://screenr.com/

I used it and am very impressed with the ease of use (no account setup/login as i already have a Twitter account) and the quality of the image and audio of the movie it output is great. Here it is:

Omnium – great collaborative online space

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This is a great product developed here in Australia by the University of NSW, College of Fine Arts (COFA) about 5 years ago. http://omnium.net.au/

I like their metaphors for the different spaces. Each student has a “filing cabinet” which is their personal files.

To share these they “publish” them to “The Wall” which is a shared gallery space for the equivalent of your workgroup/workspace, where you can add comments. This works best when the files are images or video (which is what it was designed for, developed by/for the College of Fine Arts.) Then if the teacher thinks your work is great, they can publish it to a “Class Wall” for the whole class to see.

The best work in the class can be published to a Public Wall, ie a virtual art gallery space that anybody can view. Great promo/marekting for COFA.

Would you like to be able to promote your student work in this way? With their permission of course…

omnium

Grad Diploma Education

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 I met with Sharon Tindall-Ford from Faculty of Education today regarding  The Grad Diploma Ed. It’s an intensive 10 month program with about 350 students in each intake ie per year. It is taught across 4 different campus: Wollongong, BB, SH and Bega.

The students spend 55 days in the classroom – about 20% of the total learning time.

Their program consists of core subjects from Wgong in the main plus eduStream for large classes and some video conferencing (vcf). Sharon said they are moving away from co-ordinators in each location, hence they have an ESDF project to harness appropriate technologies for Multi-location teaching, and ongoing professional development for interactive teaching ie 2-way approach even in the large classes. Richard Caladine working on this aspect with Tess Snowball. They are looking to move from eduStream to interactive vcf even for the large classes.

New requirement: Sharon wants to offer scheduled syncronous staff/student consultations to facilitate feedback and reflection on the classroom prac experience. Could be one-on-one, could be scheduled for tutor to whole tutorial, could be opt-in sessions on key topics eg Maths lesson plans, Classroom management. Also good for interventions for students struggling and under strees, to keep them in the program.

Who else wants this kind of facility?